


Slipping through her fingers

by Ghelik



Series: The 100 Fics [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Children, F/F, F/M, Minor Abby Griffin/Marcus Kane, Parent Abby, Soldiers, unbetad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 12:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8014390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghelik/pseuds/Ghelik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On her mother's mantle is a picture of her wedding in which she's standing next to him, her fair and curvy, him dark and hard lines. </p><p>She hates that photo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slipping through her fingers

The splash of the shower drummed on her back and plastered her hair to her head. She was trembling, facing the wall and trying to ease her breathing back down to normal. Her heart crashed against her ribs, threatening to break free.

Underwater every sound seemed muted. A pair of strong, tanned arms sneaked around her waist, pulling her back against a hard chest. She could feel the heat of his skin, the slight goosebumps - the water was always too cold for this stupid, amazing man -, the puckered scar on his chest. She gripped his arms around her waist, hugging herself in the process. His hands burned at her sides, thumbs tracing circles just beneath her breast. 

  
"I’ve missed you," she whispered, leaning her head back against his shoulder, water raining down her cheeks.

  
" _I’m right here, babe_ ," she could feel his breath hot and sweet against the shell of her ear. " _I’m right here._ "

  
Someone knocked on the door and the arms around her disappeared.

  
"Clarke? Honey, are you alright?"

  
For a terrifying moment, she didn’t know where she was. The tiles in front of her were familiar, but not the ones at home. The conditioner on the rack wasn’t hers, and that was definitively not _his_ soap. Then it hit her. She was at her mom's.

  
"Clarke I’m going to come in, ok?"

  
When her mother entered the bathroom, she was sitting in the bathtub, soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably.

  
"Oh, baby…"

  
Abby rushed to her side, shutting the shower-head off and wrapping a fluffy towel around her shoulders. She sat in the wet bathtub with her, rubbing her arms while Clarke cried.

 

***

 

Her old bedroom smelled funny. Not bad, but it was so different from the smell of their room back in Ton DC, it felt sort of wrong. The dormitory hadn’t changed since she left it at eighteen to go to medical school, then drop off and go to art school instead. The pictures on the walls and the posters were a perfect reflection of her tastes and her friends of that time. Her books – the ones not important enough to make it to Ton DC with her - were still neatly organized on the white bookshelf.

 

The only new things were the small fold-out bed and the crib in the corner. The fold-out bed was empty, still perfectly made with flowery sheets that smelled of her mother's detergent. Clarke had put Alexander into her bed and knew she would just curl in with him and not sleep at all. Toby snored softly in the white crib. 

  
Alexander opened an eye to look at her. He looked just like his father with his cute flop of unruly hair, constellations across the bridge of his nose and dark slanted eyes; had all of his father's mannerisms, too. He extended one of his chubby little hands towards her until she complied and lay down with him.  

 

She hugged him close – maybe harder than she should – and hummed until he fell back asleep.

 

 

If she were back home, she would have put him in his little bed and padded across the hall into _their_ room. _He_ would’ve been sitting on the bed with his reading glasses on, and they would have sex wearing nothing but those nerdy glasses. He would tease her – “ _you have weird fetishes, Clarke Griffin_ ” – and she would tease him right back – “you still angry about that library in Alexandria.”

They would play-fight for control, and then they would fall asleep curled around each other. He loved being the little spoon - “ _because that way I won’t choke on your hair all night_ ” - because he felt safe with her at his back.

  
Alexander dreamt in her arms, but sleep eluded her.

  
Clarke stood up and wandered around her mother's house. It was eerie quiet: half-shadows at every corner, happy faces smiling from the walls. A picture of her wedding was on the mantle in the living room: her all fair and curvy; him dark and powerful. On the photo on his mother’s mantle he looked stiff and serene, still happy, but that hard happiness of someone holding himself tightly under control.

 

She hated this picture. That wasn’t him at all.

  
Her favorite wedding photo was back home, on an un-intrusive corner of their hallway, where she could see it reflected on the bathroom mirror when she brushed her teeth, and on her way into her babies’ bedroom. It featured his handsome husband with his soldier-buddies and his fierce little sister - the reason they had met -, all teasing and laughing in a fantastic unguarded moment of absolute bliss.

  
Needless to say, her mother had never really approved of him. Abby thought he was a dim-witted little soldier, that he was just not good enough.

Clarke and her mother fought about that a lot. He didn’t care, shrugging it off with a smile. " _I am a soldier. And I am dimmer-witted than you. So… you know… she has a poin_ t,"  he would say, always prone to self-deprecation.

  
It never failed to anger her that he would be so carelessly wrong about his opinion of himself.

 

 

Clarke met him at a paintball game Octavia had organized for her birthday. Clarke, Raven, and Octavia were college friends. They shared a small apartment a few blocks from their university. She had heard a lot about O's older brother long before they met in person. He enlisted when he was eighteen to pay for his sister's education since their mother was either too drunk to keep a job or too high to care about her children's future. 

 

When Clarke saw him for the first time, he was wearing a dark helmet, crouching behind some crates.

  
" _You’re awful at this_ ," he had whispered, examining the paint splattered on her left arm; a small smirk peeking beneath the dark screen of his helmet.

  
"I got ambushed by your buddies," she growled crossly. "Are you going to stay here all day?"

  
" _Do you want me to shoot you?_ "

 

She considered it for a moment, and he laughed at her. "I’d rather not die in the first ten minutes of the game."

  
And somehow she had charmed him into not fake-shoot her with his very-much-not-fake paintball gun – those things stung. Only later, when they were having celebratory drinks, did she learn he was Octavia's older brother.

 

By the end of the month Clarke knew a few things more about O's brother among them:

 

He loved guns with a passion. Didn't care much for violence, but could wax poetically about the shape of an assault rifle for over half an hour.

 

He loved history even more than guns. For his twenty-fourth birthday, his squad had gifted him with the money for an online course at the University of Polis - which apparently had a great history program. He was now the proud owner of a degree in ancient Greek and Roman history.

 

She was madly in love with him and wanted to have his babies.

 

 ***

 

From all of his friends, Murphy was her least favorite.

 

She never understood why he trusted Murphy so much, why he put up with all his bullshit, all his crude dark humor, and bad attitude.

 

Clarke had made her feelings on that little piece of shit clear many times, and yet, here he was: standing in the doorway of her mother’s house, looking as careless and as assholey as ever in a dark leather jacket.

  
"Hey, Clarke," he tried for a smile, but it looked fake.

  
Murphy shuffled from foot to foot, and she was just so angry.

 

How dare he? How dare Murphy be here when _he_ wasn’t?

 

She didn’t notice she was punching him in the face until he braced himself against the door, looking up at her through his long dark lashes. For a moment he looked like a child – his eyes too big for a grown man's face. He looked lost and like he’d been crying and Clarke felt terrible for hitting him, it was not his fault he had dropped off the military after his baby girl was born. It was not Murphy's fault that he hadn’t been there to die instead of _him_.

  
"I-I’m sorry, Murphy."

  
He shrugged it off, his smile seemed even sadder and faker now. 

  
"Don’t worry about it, Clarke."

  
His hands were back in his pockets, where she knew he had some trinket to fiddle with. 

  
 Clarke cleared her throat. "Please, come in," and stepped aside. Murphy limped in, following her into the living-room.

  
"What are you doing here?" she asked instead of asking him how he had known where her mom lived in the first place, and that she’d be here in the second.

  
"I thought we could take a few shots," he shrugged off his backpack and produced a bottle of tequila, a lemon and a salt shaker in the form of a hen.

  
"It’s like five p.m."

  
He found two shot glasses decorated with pictures of Princess Leia and Han Solo in his backpack.

  
"Perfect time to take shots with someone you hate. I’m Leia." He poured the tequila into the shot glasses.

  
"I don’t hate you."

  
"Whatever. Just drink with me, ok?"

  
She took the Han Solo shot glass and knocked it back grimacing at the taste. She watched him lick some salt off his fist and then take a whole lemon slice into his mouth.

  
After their third shot, she asked again. "Why are you here?"

  
"Well," he was leaning back on the couch, looking at her wedding picture with narrowed eyes. "I can’t very much get drunk home, now with Ivy running around. And I thought you might like some company."

  
"I have plenty of company." Her voice was harsher than she intended.

  
"Yeah, right."

  
She had: Her mom and Marcus were constantly checking on her, her friends – those that still lived in Polis – came by as often as they could. Those that weren’t here called or skyped. Clarke had so much company she was starting to choke on it. All she wanted was to be alone.

  
Clarke watched him take another shot and bite another slice of lemon. He was still looking at her wedding photo.

  
"The first time I was in combat I was sure I was going to die. I couldn’t see anything; not two feet in front of me. I could hear all the prattling on the coms, all the shooting around. I don’t remember much of that moment. Only that I was sure I was going to die, and that I didn’t understand what I was doing there. _He_  appeared out of nowhere. PUFF, he was there by my side, helping me out of the crossfire. After that, he told me it would get better with time. As with many things, he was right."

  
She blinked at him.

  
"I’m…" Murphy swallowed, and if his eyes were misted she didn't comment "I’m not great with people…"

  
"I hadn’t noticed."

  
Murphy shot her a poisonous look, before rolling his eyes back to the photo.

  
"But I promised I’d look after you if anything happened to him."

  
"Why?"

  
Now the look on his face was open and vulnerable. He was younger than her, Clarke suddenly remembered. Was he even thirty? _He_ was planning to throw Murphy a party when he came back, said he loved surprise parties. Clarke couldn’t remember. Of all of his friends, Murphy was the one she liked the least.

 

But at this moment he was here speaking not of how sorry he was for her loss, not asking her how she was holding up or how the kids were taking it – they were taking it great: one of them too young to understand, the other still believed that he was coming back because daddy was always travelling to make the world better and always came back with tales about goddesses and horrifying monsters that got slaughtered by the heroes.

  
Murphy was here remembering him, and that was something she hadn't known she needed.

  
"Because you and O are the most important things in his life. Well you, and the kids and O. But you know what I mean."

  
"Yeah, I know why he made you promise. But why did you do it?"

  
He drank. Slower this time, playing with his shot glass, running his thumbnail over the picture of Leia.

  
"He’s… He was… He is important to me. And you’re important to him, so… It’s a kind of 'by proxy thing.'”

  
She nodded.

  
"He wanted you to be Tobys godfather." Clarke had been radically opposed to that choice.

 

Murphy snorted. "Have you met me? I am not godfather material. But, if you need anything," he shrugged. "I can help."

  
They lapsed into silence.

  
"I hate that picture," he said suddenly.

  
"Yeah, me too."

  
"I mean. It makes you look really fat in that dress."

  
She blinked, a surprised laugh escaping her. Murphy had the decency of hiding his smug, sad smile with his shot glass.

 

***

 

"Are you sure you will be alright?"

  
Her mom looked at her with her concerned frown while Clarke strapped her children into their seats in her small car.

  
"Yes. It’s time I go back home."

  
"Sweety, you know you can stay here as long as you want to."

  
She hugged her mom.

  
"I know. But… I need to go back now."

  
The drive back to Ton DC was long and tedious with her babies sleeping in the back and nobody to talk to in the passenger seat.

  
Her home was dark and cold. There was dirty laundry in the basket, and she had forgotten to unload the dishwasher before leaving.

She put her children to bed in her room, not ready to sleep alone just yet.

  
Every corner was haunted by sweet memories and, for a terrifying moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Then the moment passed and even though everything ached she knew she had to move on.

 

***

  
Clarke crawled into bed with his shirt on. It had lost nearly all of his scent. His side of the bed was freezing. Still, when she closed her eyes she could imagine his arms around her waist, his skin hot against hers, his breath against her neck.

  
"I miss you," she whispered into the darkness of her room.

  
He should kiss her neck at the base of her skull and then nibble at her earlobe. He should pinch and tickle her until she was breathless and crying from laughing so hard.

  
Instead, the smell on his shirt was barely there, and his side of the bed was still empty.

  
She called his name into the darkness even though she knew he was not coming back.

 

***

 

In her dreams, she’s younger. She’s sitting on the terrace of her favorite café, his knee against hers and their hands nearly touching.

They’re people watching. He points at random people for her to sketch. In her dreams, he’s smiling that kind and unguarded smile he keeps for the people he loves.

  
The dreams usually end with him standing up.

  
" _Now you draw me._ "

  
And he walks away. Usually, she cannot sketch him.

 

Sometimes, though she does. In her sketches he’s always holding the paintball gun he had when they met, always has a splatter of bright paint across his chest.

  
When she wakes her room is always empty. Though sometimes, there are children sleeping on his side of the bed or bouncing on the mattress.

  
Holidays without him have always been hard, but now that he’s gone they seem worse. And yet Clarke keeps waking up and taking care of her children, working on her art and meeting with friends.

  
And suddenly she has walked out of the shadow of his absence and into the light. When she falls in love again, it feels different, but not less real. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal because it isn’t.

 

When Lexa moves in he books are in physics and cheap paperback thrillers. Clarke's children love her, and she’s good with them the same as she’s good with Clarke.

  
One morning finds Lexa standing in front of Clarke’s wedding photo, the one in which _he_ ’s so carefree and happy, the one that Clarke can still see from the bathroom mirror while she brushes her teeth.

  
"Tell me about him?"

  
And it feels good to talk about him again, too. Clarke can smile, hugging this new beautiful love that she has found while talking about the previous one.

  
"His name was Bellamy Blake."

**Author's Note:**

> As always this was unbetad.  
> Thanks for reading and commenting.


End file.
